Total Immersion: Xenakis

Tuesday 10 March 2009 20.59 EDT
First published on Tuesday 10 March 2009 20.59 EDT

The last of the BBC's three composer days this season was devoted to the uncompromising music of Iannis Xenakis. As well as talks and films, there were two concerts. The first, given by students from the Guildhall School, was devoted to three of Xenakis's rebarbative percussion works, while the three-part evening programme was shared between the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins, the BBC Singers under Stephen Betteridge and pianist Rolf Hind.

If Xenakis's music has gone into partial eclipse since his death in 2001, this was the perfect way to reassert its unique power. The densely packed Tracées from 1987, with which Brabbins and the BBCSO opened their concert, was a reminder that, for all the abstruse mathematical theory behind them, the visceral punch of his best works has few precedents in 20th-century music. The early trilogy Anastenaria, receiving its first complete British performance, graphically charts the way in which Xenakis found his own voice in the early 1950s, evolving from a Carl Orff-like primitivism to fragmented, deliberately alienating instrumental writing.

Both the trombone concerto Troorkh - composed in 1991 for Christian Lindberg who repeated his phenomenal, extrovert performance here - and the ballet Antikhthon, which Balanchine commissioned 20 years earlier, are typical Xenakis, cast in massive tectonic blocks and crammed with tingling, mysterious sounds. Between these thrillingly well-played scores, the BBC Singers gave equally accomplished accounts of two unaccompanied vocal works. Sea Nymphs atomises one of Ariel's songs from The Tempest, while Nuits, Xenakis's passionate protest against the military coup in Greece in 1967, remains as eerily potent as ever. It is proof that, for all its astringency, his best music always had a powerful humanity of its own.